Monthly Archives: May 2012

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The scramble to dig up any piece of salacious dirt, gossip, or innuendo about President Obama before he was President Obama is never ending. The latest in the long train of purported tell all exposes on Obama is no different. Due out in June, Barack Obama: The Story is a story, but like the others that have taken a whack at Obama hardly amounts to much. The book treads the same well worn path as the other Obama exposes. It cobbles together dozens of interviews with supposed intimates of Obama, always with the hope of uncovering some unflattering nugget of sex, drugs, violence, duplicity, scheming and connivance that will show the “real” Obama. This supposedly will demolish the standard narrative of the pre White House Obama as an energetic, conscientious, cerebral, hard working, clean living, young man, who constantly assessed and reassessed where he wanted to be and go in life. The book reveals that Obama had several girlfriends, including a live-in white girlfriend, that he liked to wear a sarong around the house, and with a strong hint that he ultimately rejected her because she was white. But the real find supposedly is that Obama has been near Machiavellian in masterfully parlaying his clean cut All-American image into a Teflon like presidency, and a likeability factor that’s virtually unassailable. The Story fails to lay low the soul searching, but positive, story that Obama told about his rise, and that has been confirmed by most others that were close to him. His positive image has withstood the most intense, relentless, effort to assail the character, reputation of a sitting president whose personal conduct in office has been beyond reproach in modern times. It’s also understood that popular and likeable public figures also have human failings and foibles. Every public figure has that element sewn into the fabric of their rise to fame. And that includes Obama.
That’s really not the point of the avalanche of supposed tell all books on Obama. The point is to tantalize the public and belittle the administration. The timing of the Barack Obama: The Story is no accident. It comes as the 2012 presidential campaign kicks into high gear, and this virtually guarantees that the long parade of anti-Obama blogs, web sites, right wing hit jocks will have a field day running with the gossipy bits from the book such as courtesy of one of his girlfriends that he “played with a good poker face.” The inference is that Obama is calculating, even duplicitous and always masks his true aim which supposedly is to do anything to advance himself.
News editors, TV executives, and publishers insist that the alleged foibles and peccadilloes of celebrities, even those that wear the mantle of the presidency, are fair game for exposure. They are public figures and there is no such thing as privacy when that’s the case. This is of course, pure bunkum. Their only interest is how high ratings can be shoved upward, and how many newspapers and books can be sold in mining journalistic muck. It’s no different with Barack Obama: The Story.
News gathering is a business and it’s certainly well established that sensational news, manufactured or otherwise, sells more than any other news. The rash of books on presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and most recently with Nixon, that purport to tell all about their days before they set behind the desk in the Oval Office are guaranteed to be big hits and will almost always translate into jingling cash registers at book stores, and in online sales. By contrast, a book about the inside debates and deliberations in a White House over a job or health care bill or a foreign policy issue is guaranteed to draw snores from the public and gather dust on bookstore shelves.
In a book that purports to tell all about the real pre President Obama the author and the publisher can have it both ways. They smugly climb up on their high horse and claim that the public has a right to know about a president’s inner life and then turn the table and claim that the public wants to know this stuff anyway and couldn’t give a hoot about substantive public policy issues.
Some are trying hard to make the case that the president is anxious about the book coming out in the midst of his reelection drive; anxious supposedly because it could wound his image, be latched on by the GOP to assail his personal character, and worse taint him with some voters. He need not worry. This won’t be the last book to corral a legion of inside sources to spin a juicy tangle of rumor, gossip, and exaggerations to sell a book. The public is jaded enough now to expect that. There’s no story in the Barack Obama: the Story that will change that enough to harm a president.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

President Obama made it plain in a news conference on the one year anniversary of the bin Laden kill that there has been no excessive celebration” of the hit. He’s right. Obama has gone out of his way to make sure at least publicly that neither he nor anyone on his staff has mugged for the cameras giving high fives on an assassination even if the target was America’s most hated killer and the world’s most wanted mass murderer mastermind. But that didn’t stop the GOP from ragging on Obama for turning the bin Laden kill into a political chip. They have a point and there’s danger in that for Obama. Americans universally cheered the bin Laden take out. But there is no evidence from polls or otherwise that they are doing hand stands a year later at his death. It was a job that had and for most should have been done. And now that it was done a year ago, let’s move on seems to be more the attitude of most Americans.

The President should do the same. That means squash the campaign ads touting the kill, the hits on Romney for alleging that he would have blown off any effort to hunt down bin Laden, and arm wrestling with the GOP over the importance of the kill. To keep bin Laden in the news just pours more fuel on the political fire, and gives the GOP more ammunition to paint the president as a politically driven opportunist. That’s a pitfall that Obama can and should avoid on his battle path to reelection.

All the old rules of politics are gone.The new “wisdom” is not to search for your opponent’s weakness but, on the contrary, attack his strengths. Thus the Republicans went after John Kerry, a decorated war hero with two purple hearts, as a weak-kneed liberal and a coward in battle. Shameless but effective.

The last presidential election cycle they went after Obama as an elitist, Harvard educated snob, disconnected from real Americans. This against an African-American whose mother had to accept welfare. Really? Again shameless.

Now, since the default charge against all Democrats is that they’re weak on defense, they are going after Obama for bragging that under his leadership General Motors is alive and Osama is dead.” They call this unseemly and “spiking the ball” and politicizing what should have been an all American moment of unity.

Of course this is utter hypocrisy. Had George W gotten Osama he would certainly have spiked the ball, called mission accomplished and swaggered. The Democrats would have complained as passionately, opportunistically and disingenuously as the Republicans are complaining now.

Had Obama not ordered the hit, they would also be complaining. This is just how we play this season. The Dems will go after Romney not just on the policies he supports but also on his accomplishments. They will wedge him with his healthcare legislation in Massachusetts and attack his record as a successful businessman. They’ll go at his strength and record every job out-sourced and every worker laid off. His perspicacity in diversifying his investments will show a lack of commitment and his harboring money in the Caribbean and Switzerland will not be prudence but treason.

This strategic doctrine of attacking the opponent’s strength is designed to take away the ability to run on a record and put the other side on the defensive. It makes perfect sense. You try to make the other side run on their failures and deny them any accomplishments at all–or at least act as if reporting your record was ungentlemanly and improper.

This is an audacious strategy and the only way to defeat it is to ignore it and double-down on your accomplishments. Obama must not be prodded into being diffident about either the bailout or ordering the hit on Osama. He knows that whatever he does will be picked apart and spun into dishonorable failure, downright treason, or when possible, both.

This is the time to brag, to assert that these two major accomplishments were both, at the time, opposed by Romney. If he doesn’t have the guts to say this loud and proud, he won’t be the president next term and wouldn’t deserve the office. I have every confidence that he will go for it with gusto and lan. No coward he, he won’t be cowed.
2012 Jonathan Dobrerwww.Dobrer.com

The GOP Continues to Play Fast and Furious with Holder
Earl Ofari Hutchinson

House Majority leader John Boehner’s “green light” to the GOP controlled House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to consider a contempt of Congress citation against Attorney General Eric Holder is just the latest in the continuing dance of political gamesmanship the GOP is playing with President Obama. That’s right Obama. The ostensible issue is that Holder refuses to cooperate with the committee in turning over presumably incriminating documents that would tell what Holder did or didn’t do in the botched ATF’s Mexican gun sting operation “fast and furious.” The issue is just as partisan politically contemptible as the legion of other GOP ploys to taint Obama through Holder. And they have been come just as fast and furious practically from the moment that Holder took the reins at the Justice Department.

The ATF gun sting hit on Holder is hardly new. Former President George W. Bush’s DOJ ran a similar gun sting a year before Obama took office. The program resumed in 2010 with no evidence that Holder knew all the details or the problems with the sting operation. Many of which as he testified were not disclosed to him by operatives. The program ultimately was not a DOJ operation but a local law enforcement program that should have drawn fire but should not have been blown up into a manic partisan crusade against Holder.

A distressed Holder made that exact point during the sweating he got from Congressional GOP attackers some months ago when he bluntly called the attacks “politically motivated gotcha games.” The implication is that the attacks are just another in the saber rattle against him and by extension Obama. And he’s right.
Holder was always seen by the GOP as the weak link in the Obama chain of command. Someone that was politically vulnerable because of his past position as a Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton administration. He took much heat then allegedly for giving the nod to controversial Clinton pardons, lobbying efforts on behalf of a communications company and for upholding the court order to send the 6 year-old Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba. Since then the GOP threatened to filibuster against his appointment as Attorney General, ripped him for publicly chiding the nation on the racial divide, and for turning a blind eye to alleged voter intimidation by the New Black Panthers. These are all phony, self-serving, political hatchet job issues. The intent is, of course, to paint Holder as a corrupt, political deal maker, and a closet racial bigot. The idea is by inference to paint Obama through Holder with the same brush. Or at the very least, plant the seed that Holder’s appointment and tenure at the DOJ typifies the poor and untrustworthy judgment of Obama in picking his political appointees.
Holder has enough GOP partisan lashes on his back to know that no matter how many facts he cites to bolster his case that he didn’t know or certainly approve any illicit doings in the sting ATF operation, the issue won’t go away. The GOP will toss out empty threats such as demands for his firing, or resignation, and even talk about impeachment. It won’t happen. But it’s media catchy and sensational enough to keep Holder on the hot seat. The issue will be bandied about even more throughout 2012.

Holder has tried to stay out front of the GOP attack dogs by spending hours in testimony before the GOP controlled House panels. He has repeatedly publicly admitted that mistakes were made, calling the ATF’s tactics “unacceptable,” and has accepted blame for them, calling them “inexcusable.” The GOP House members that scream for Holder’s head know that he has done no wrong. The House panel has gone through the motions and purportedly drawn up a 48 page bill of particulars against Holder that supposedly will be the basis for a contempt citation at some undetermined future date. The panel has given no sign that it’s in any hurry to call for a full House vote.
With the 2012 presidential election set to kick into high gear in the coming weeks, however, and with the GOP’s hysteric vow to make Obama a one term president, if the GOP can keep the heat on Holder, the nation’s top law enforcement official, and an official close to Obama, it will serve as a red herring to toss more mud on Obama and hope that it sticks. That’s the reason, and the only reason, that the GOP will continue to play fast and furious with Holder.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson